by D V Wolfe
I sat up straighter in my seat and tightened my one-handed grip on the steering wheel. I hadn’t even thought of this. Maybe there would be something useful in the footage. “Did you see something that might help us track her and the tribe?”
“Well, no,” Stacks said. “Because it wasn’t her.”
10
I was so stunned it took me a minute before I could speak. “What...what do you mean, it wasn’t her? I saw the smiley face. It was the H.A.N.D. tribe.”
“It was,” Stacks said. “But she wasn’t leading the attack.”
I relaxed a bit. “Well, she’s the queen cannibal. I think she only gets her hands dirty when she wants to.”
“No, it’s not that,” Stacks said. “It’s...hard to explain and I definitely don’t want to do it over the phone. I think you should see this. How long would it take you to get to Messina?”
“About four hours,” I said. “We’re at Kess’.”
“I hope you didn’t use the salt. What are you doing there?”
“Long story,” I said.
“Well, whatever,” Stacks said. “Just get here. And I don’t have my new trailer yet. I’m staying with Marge and Tessa, in their apartment over their boutique on 2nd Street. Leave your truck in the lot behind Max’s Tires where they park the cars that are done and ready for pick up. Today’s the sabbath, so no one will be there to notice. ” And he hung up.
I turned to look at Noah. “New plan. We’re going to Messina.”
“What’s going on?” Noah asked.
“Stacks found something on the security cameras and between his paranoia and what sounds like a caffeine overdose, surprise, surprise, he doesn’t want to talk about it over the phone. So we’re going there.”
Noah shrugged. “It’s not like we had another plan anyway.”
I gave him the finger.
It was just after ten when we rolled into Messina. I skirted Main Street and the cop shop, not anxious to get reintroduced to Sheriff Mervin Orville and his sidekicks. The whole way, I’d been trying to work out what the hell Stacks could be talking about. Sister Smile built that tribe and I’d seen first hand how ruthlessly she ran it. What he’d said didn’t make any sense. Of course, she would be calling the shots on the attack. I drove down the alley behind Max’s and pulled into a spot between two cars that were probably finished at the end of the day on Friday and wouldn’t be picked up until Monday.
“Do we need any…” Noah motioned around the truck. “You know, stabby or blast-y things?”
“To go see Stacks?” I asked. Noah caught my gaze and we both grinned. I shook my head. “Nah. But, I reserve my right to change my mind later and send you out to get them.”
“Fair enough,” Noah said.
We locked up and Noah followed me down the alley to the back door of Tessa and Marge’s boutique, Enigma. It was a novelty shop with everything from strange kitchen utensils to telescopes, science project kits, clothes, rare books, and everything in between. Stacks had gotten on Tessa and Marge’s good side by helping them in the rare books department, so it wasn’t all that surprising that they were letting him stay with them. Marge and Tessa were also professional prostitutes. Marge had explained to me once that in a town like Messina, with the available dating pool, they might as well be getting paid for making an effort. I had to hand it to them. They were good businesswomen. Besides the boutique and their sexual enterprises, they apparently ran a hell of a craps game.
Just as we reached the back door, Marge stepped through it, her long legs wrapped in a pair of tights that fit her like a model and knee-high leather boots. Her hair, make-up, and top were perfect. She looked as if she’d just stepped off the cover of a magazine. She smiled when she saw us and waved.
“Hiya,” Marge said. “Willy said you’d be coming. He’s just upstairs.” She flipped open a pack of cigarettes and pulled one out.
“Thanks, Marge,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Craps tonight, if you’re going to be around and want to get in on the action.” Marge gave Noah a brief once over.
“Sorry,” I said. I put a hand on Noah’s shoulder. “Gotta make sure this one gets to bed on time, what with tomorrow being Sunday school.” I could feel Noah’s dirty look aimed at me but I kept my gaze on Marge. She grinned and winked at me.
“Well, maybe we can deal you in when he’s old enough to put himself to bed.”
As soon as we moved past Marge and through the back door, Noah punched me in the shoulder. “Not funny, Bane.”
“Payback,” I said. “For the Gabe crap.”
Noah opened his mouth to say something but hesitated. He closed it and we started climbing the backstairs. “Who’s Willy?” he finally asked.
“Stacks,” I said. “His first name is actually Wilford.”
“Oh man,” Noah said. I glanced over at him. “I can’t believe you kept this from me. Wilford? I’m going to give him so much shit.”
I paused on the stairs and turned to face him. “Not that I’m not one hundred percent behind giving Stacks shit, but he really hates his name. Marge and Tessa are the only people he lets call him anything but Stacks. So, if you want to throw that punch, do it on our way out? We need to figure out what he found.”
Noah snapped me a smartass salute and I rolled my eyes. I continued up the stairs with him chuckling behind me like Muttley from the Wacky Races cartoon.
At the top of the landing, I knocked once and the door was yanked open.
“Get in here,” Stacks spat.
“Good to see you too,” I said. Stacks didn’t seem to have heard me. He’d already turned around and retreated back into the apartment. We followed him. The apartment was huge. It looked like it took up the entire second floor of the boutique and the deli next door. Noah and I exchanged impressed looks as we moved through the tastefully decorated rooms.
“Nice digs,” I said.
“Yeah, Tessa has a degree in interior design,” Stacks said, distractedly. We were in what was probably a guest room, buried under all of Stacks’ belongings which took up almost every inch of floor space. Stacks climbed onto the queen bed and hunkered down in front of his laptop. I looked at Noah and shrugged. There wasn’t really room for us to stand on the floor and see what he was looking at, so I climbed on the bed after Stacks and Noah followed.
“So,” I said. “What did you mean about Sister Smile not leading the attack?”
Stacks was clicking around on the laptop, blocking most of the screen. “This,” he finally said, passing the laptop over to me. Noah leaned in next to me and his boney chin brushed against my shoulder. I cut my eyes to him and he gave me an annoyed expression and moved an inch or two away. I turned my gaze back to the screen. It was the black and white night vision footage of the Johnson Meredith building. It took me a minute to realize that the camera view I was looking at was an exterior camera pointed at the street in front of the building.
“Here, the Johnson Meredith building cameras are pretty top-notch. We can zoom in. Now, hit play,” Stacks said, reaching over me to do it before I could move. The footage started rolling and a line of black Town Cars glided up to the curb. The camera view was wide enough to fit three of the Town Cars. The middle one stopped where the sidewalk and the cement path to the building’s front doors met. The backseat doors opened and two men in black suits got out. On the other side of the car, a seven-foot-tall, heavily-muscled man, rose from the driver’s seat. He had a shaved head and he was wearing a white, tailored suit and when he moved around the car to the trunk, I could see a bloody smiley face, painted on the back. He popped the trunk and took a step back as something lunged out at him. There was a cloud of gray hair and two arms, reaching up, clawing at him. Calmly, his hand struck like a snake and grabbed the figure by the cloud of hair. The figure’s arms went to their head, fighting against his hands and I finally saw the face.
“No,” I breathed. “That can’t be…”
“Sister Smile,” Stacks s
aid, pointing to the figure in the trunk. “Isn’t it?”
It was. But it didn’t make any sense. When I’d last seen the tribe, Sister Smile had waved her hand and two of her tribe members had been decapitated for trying to eat before her. The men carrying out the executions hadn’t even hesitated.
The tall man swung out with a punch, hitting her squarely in the face. She went slack and he released her hair, letting her fall back into the trunk. He was fiddling with something on her body and when he pulled it out of the trunk and put it over his head, I knew it had to be some kind of necklace.
“What’s that?” Noah asked, squinting at the screen.
“Hang on,” Stacks said. “You’ll be able to see it better in a second.” The tall man in the white suit closed the trunk and walked back to the sidewalk, the two men in black suits following him the way I’d seen Sister Smile’s toadies follow her, cowering and hands clasped in front of them. He started towards the front steps of the building, other tribe members streaming from the other two Town Cars in the camera’s view and more coming from the sides to form a stream of more than sixty cannibals, walking up the sidewalk towards the building, as if they were there for a business meeting. As they drew closer to the camera, the night vision glinted off of ax heads, the blades of swords and knives, and metal baseball bats as they were dropped down from suit jacket sleeves or revealed when jackets were unbuttoned.
“Jesus Christ,” Noah breathed. “That’s terrifying.”
“Yeah,” Stacks said. “I checked the time stamp and called Vince. He and Mick were already in the basement at this point, chasing after a couple of demons who had come out from the stairs, planning to slip away, saw them, and headed for the garage. Good thing too or the tribe would have used them as warm-up shots.”
As the crowd drew close to the camera, the tall man in front paused and smiled up at the camera lens as if he knew it was there. The camera flared and his eyes glowed red.
“There,” Stacks said, reaching over and hitting a key on the laptop. The image froze on the screen and Stacks pointed to the necklace, resting against the white shirt the man wore under the white suit jacket. Noah and I both leaned forward to study it.
“It’s the symbol,” Noah breathed. He was right. It was the symbol we’d seen carved into the dirt at the campground. The backward ‘f’ with three closed loops. A black stone was suspended in the top loop on the necklace.
“What, you’ve seen this before?” Stacks asked, jerking his head to look at Noah and then to me.
I nodded. “We went to the campground. Apparently, after this,” I nodded to the screen. “They went home and had one last ‘hurrah’, and then took off again, completely breaking camp this time. That symbol was drawn in the dirt by Sister Smile’s throne.” I stared at the Town Car behind the crowd, where Sister Smile was unconscious and in the trunk. I mean, Sister Smile had non-mainstream interests, but I kind of doubted that she’d asked a member of her tribe to punch her in the face and leave her in the trunk of one of her Town Cars during a trip to an all-you-can-eat demon buffet. I turned to look at Stacks. “A coup d'etat?” I asked, pointing at the man. “You think he’s replaced Sister Smile as the tribe leader?” It was hard to believe. Sister Smile had always felt like a supernatural being, so deeply entrenched in her Seer magic that she bordered on being a witch. But that withered figure, clawing at her captor with frail limbs and silver hair, before being left in the trunk like a sweaty gym bag, was pathetically human.
Stacks was pale, but his eyes were bright with the residue of caffeine and his findings. “I mean, that’s what it has to be, right?”
“So who’s this guy?” Noah asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t recognize him from the last time I was there, but I didn’t take yearbook photos with the rest of the tribe. I was just there to see Sister Smile and then I was kind of their prisoner until I made it out.”
“You’d think you’d remember a guy his size, though,” Stacks said.
I leaned in and stared closer at the symbol. I knew I had seen it somewhere before the campground, but I couldn’t place it. “Stacks, do you have any idea about what that symbol is?”
“No,” Stacks said. “I’ll keep looking. I haven’t had any luck yet but it’s pretty hard to look up symbols on the internet by description.”
I leaned back on the bed. “Wow. So Sister Smile has been dethroned.” Stacks was hunched over the laptop again, typing away. I watched him for a minute. “That’s probably why they didn’t bother taking her throne with them when they broke camp. Shit. They could be headed anywhere to set up a new camp.” A cold chill ran down my spine. And if they found a place they liked, they wouldn’t hesitate to take it and feed on anyone in their way. “Fuck,” I breathed. Stacks paused in his typing and he and Noah looked over at me. I shook my head, leaning it against the wall behind the bed. “How bad do you think this asshole is if he was able to oust Sister Smile?”
Stacks’ looked ill and he nodded and turned back to the computer screen. “Pretty bad. Do you want to see their exit?”
Of course, I didn’t want to, but I had to. I sat up and leaned forward to watch the night vision footage again. It was the same camera and the time stamp said it was thirteen minutes later. From under the camera’s angle, a stream of tribe members, dragging, carrying, and marching prisoners ahead of them, came into view. They diverted to the left and right of the camera view, flowing off the screen.
Then, I saw the bald head and the white jacket emerge in the sea of black, the bloody smiley face seeming to bounce down the stairs as he descended them with the energy of someone who got off of work early. His cronies had a prisoner each, and the man had two of the demons, a large hand wrapped around each neck. One of the demons struggled against him as if they were going to try to make a break for it. Suddenly, the demon’s neck was broken and the body went limp. The man in the white suit let go of the now-dead demon, letting his body slump to the ground. He calmly moved forward and put the other demon in the backseat of the Town Car, along with one of his cronies and their prisoner. He paused and looked at the passenger seat as if he was considering something. He was speaking to his other crony who still had a prisoner to stuff somewhere as well. The discussion looked like it was getting heated and the crony looked like he was starting to get upset, gesturing at his prisoner and then the passenger seat. The man in the white jacket’s smile fell away. I heard an audible gulp from Noah and Stacks as he reached out a gentle hand to touch his crony’s face. Then, in a flash, he’d dived, jaws wide, teeth flashing in the night vision. He clamped down on the crony’s throat and reared back, leaving a gaping, spurting hole in the man’s neck. The crony’s prisoner started freaking out. The man in the white jacket snapped his hand out and broke the prisoner’s neck too before it could get away. He let the body drop to the concrete while his bleeding crony thrashed around. The man had now changed his grip and was holding his crony up by the suit jacket. He raised a hand to bathe his fingers in the arterial spray. When his hand was covered, he reached over the roof of the Town Car and started to paint.
“Where’s the bathroom?” Noah moaned.
“Down the hall,” Stacks said. Noah bolted for the door, knocking over several stacks of books and files along the way.
When he was done christening the Town Car with a freshly ‘painted’ bloody smiley face, he opened the door to the back seat, his remaining crony crawled back out and went to collect the fallen bodies. The man crammed the still twitching and bleeding crony into the back seat and the other crony stuffed the two other bodies in on top of him.
“What was that? Two still alive and three dead bodies in that Town Car’s backseat?” I asked.
“It’s like a clown car,” Stacks breathed.
“The bad kind,” I said.
The man in the white jacket, well, it had been white but now was almost entirely red, paused next to the passenger side door where his remaining crony had climbed in and was waiting. The man lifted
his blood-covered hand and like a cat, his tongue darted out between his lips and he began licking the blood off his fingers. There was something, more than unnerving, about the smirk he was wearing as he licked his fingers and stared at the camera. I had a flash of memory, watching Festus lick his thumb as he smirked at me, turning pages in his red notebook. Festus had always done it as part of our back-and-forth shit-giving. With this guy doing it, it felt like a taunt. Something snapped inside me. This was the asshole, leading the crew that had killed Festus.